Artifacts, representations, and social practice Book

I noticed, but didn't read, this book years ago when I was an undergraduate. Taylor isn't opposed to people painting, writing poetry, making music .... but he does think that "art" is a socially and historically bounded ideological concept that exerts a malign influence on our class-divided societies and on creative performance itself. Shades of Foucault, Bourdieu and Nietzsche here, but written in deliberately accessible language and without apparent direct influence from any of them (though Sartre is plainly in evidence). The first chapter debunks the notion of "art" as an eternal and universal category in favour of a view of it as a kind of tyranny of taste exercised by elites as a social marker and leaving the bewildered masses excluded and feeling inadequate. The second attacks Marxist writing on art as being effectively an uncritical attempt to save the values of the haute bourgeoisie from the corrosive philistinism of the market (hence the appeal of Marxism to the "sensitive" intellectual. "Not radical enough!" is Taylor's verdict: "art" itself is tainted and oppressive! The final chapter explores the assimilation of jazz into art, the shifting historical meanings of the desire for jazz to become "art" and the differing psychological and social needs served by this at different times. Taylor's view is that the aspiration to be "art" ended up killing jazz as a musical and social form.

The book appeared in the Harvester "Philosophy Now" series in 1978, a series somewhat associated with Radical Philosophy. It was oppositional then and anything like it would be now. You can't see a book like this getting a good score in the UK's Research Excellence Framework or, indeed, getting taken seriously as philosophy. Which is a shame.